Fifteen Certified Flats, 110,000 Still Illegal
The Fridge Magnet Math
So this week the government held up three flats on Cheung Sha Wan Road, a street in Sham Shui Po, and said, look, it works. These are the first officially certified 'basic housing units' in the city. That means flats that have been inspected and signed off as meeting a new minimum safety standard for subdivided housing. The owner, a guy named Hayson Chan, spent HK$151,700 since March on drainage, fire doors, meters, fans, the unglamorous stuff that actually keeps a place from flooding or burning. Fair play to him, he actually did it.
Here is the number that matters. Four months into this scheme, with about 19,000 units already registered as subdivided flats, the government has certified fifteen flats as meeting the new standard. Fifteen. Secretary Winnie Ho, the minister in charge of housing, said it herself.
Do the maths with me. Fifteen in four months works out to about forty-five a year. There are 110,000 subdivided units in this city. That means studios and one-bed flats that have been chopped up into two or more smaller units, usually illegally. At forty-five certifications a year, you are not clearing that backlog by 2030. You are clearing it sometime after your grandchildren retire. Officials are already floating a four-year honest timeline, even though the law on the books says 2030. At forty-five certifications a year, the backlog clears sometime in the 2050s.
Who Pays For Clean
Now here is the part nobody put in the press release. For the flats that DO get fixed up, rents go up 5 to 15 per cent. That is not landlords being greedy for its own sake. It is the direct consequence of the last section: they just spent real money on doors and drains to pass certification, and that bill has to land somewhere. So it lands on the rent.
Meanwhile, a lot of the people living in these flats are working with a rent ceiling around HK$3,000 a month. That means that is roughly the top of what they can actually afford, full stop. That is not a number I am making up to sound sad, that is what tenants and advocates keep saying out loud. So follow the logic through: the safer, legal, properly ventilated flat now costs more than the dodgy one did. Great upgrade if you can afford the jump. If you cannot, you are the one who moves, because the flat did not get cheaper. It got compliant.
And here is the deadline that turns this from a slow squeeze into a hard wall. From March 2027, renting out an unregistered unit becomes a crime, carrying a HK$300,000 fine and up to three years in jail. After that date the landlord has two moves: fix up and raise the rent, or shut the unit down.
The Housing Bureau calls fifteen certified flats in four months 'pragmatic.' The scheme has a hard date, March 2027, and a hard number, 110,000 units still uncertified. Somebody in government needs to say plainly whether this law rescues the 220,000 people living in these flats or the buildings around them. As of this week, the certificate count says buildings.